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Milwaukee Brew City PUG – August 2020

August 31, 2020 By Mike Carlo
Milwaukee Brew City PUG – August 2020

Back again with another Power BI User group for Milwaukee. This month Mike and Seth walk through the beta release of external tools. If you didn’t see the announcement from Microsoft but in July of 2020 was the release of External tools.

What are External Tools? I’m glad you asked. An External Tool is an application that can be used along side with Power BI. Parameters can be passed from Power BI desktop into the External Tool, such as a connection string to the data model.

We are super thrilled about this new ability to enhance the Power BI desktop experience so much that we built a custom installer that will enable users install many of these external tools all in one place. This is why we build Business Ops.

Watch this month’s PUG to see how to install External Tools for your machine.

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